Scarlet Fever

I am eight the autumn when my skin
blooms along the wrists, a patch of red that spreads
like the glow beneath hot coals.  The teachers,
concerned, swoop in, moving closer

and also away.  Who ever fails
the third grade? But I almost do.
One minute, sitting Indian-
style (we'd actually called it that),

in Cranbrook Elementary's multipurpose room --
for some reason I won't remember -- and then
escorted away, through rows of other Natives
and to the school nurse, who will sentence me to five

hours of waiting.  That, and bloodletting
in the E.R., through the smallest of openings
in a finger that refuses to betray me.
My neck has stiffened and will swell.  I know

I am going to die because my father
has appeared in my life; I need to be driven there --
yesterday -- and he drives.  And then:  home
for a month -- feverish, asleep, consumed

suddenly with citrus fruit and a type of cheese
my mother has bought on a whim; it's on sale --
and I read Little House on the Prairie and am alive
in the wrong century, fading in and out

of eighteen eighty something.  Of all things,
also, that I will never remember, there, on television,
is Laura Ingalls in braids, in calico bonnets,
her body like mine straining past hemlines --

she and I each swelling in anticipation
of winter, of hunger, of Almanzo
Wilder.  We are both waiting for the one
where her sister goes blind.